Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Monday, June 06, 2016

EPA Pollutes River, Uses Scare Tactics To Take Control Of A Colorado Town

A decades-long battle between federal environmental officials and a
small Colorado town is about to end in the government’s favor, thanks to
the agency-caused Gold King Mine spill disaster, a Daily Caller News
Foundation investigation has found.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representatives have focused
intently on Silverton, Colorado since the mid-1990s, accumulating
evidence — and sometimes using scare tactics — to persuade residents to
drop their opposition to a Superfund designation for the surrounding
region.

Residents surrendered to federal demands only after an EPA work-crew
turned the nearby Animas River bright yellow for nearly a week by
releasing a three-million-gallon flood of acidic mine waste under
extremely questionable circumstances in August 2015.

Suspended in the flood was 880,000 pounds of toxic metals, including
lead and arsenic, that poured into the river that supplies drinking
water for people living in three states and the Navajo Nation. The mine
is just upstream from Silverton.

...The disaster was the last straw that convinced locals to reverse
their decades-long opposition and allow the EPA to go forward in
designating the region for Superfund listing – a designation the agency
reserves only for the nation’s most polluted sites.

Once the designation becomes official, EPA will assume vast new
powers throughout the region. But EPA has been encroaching on residents’
lives going back to at least 1994, with more than a few memorable
episodes along the way.

...How EPA has used Superfund authority against Silverton exemplifies
the inability of local residents to resist the federal agency when it is
determined to have its way.

The first goal of the Animas River Stakeholders Group that was formed
in 1994 to protect the environment from abandoned mines was to “keep
CERCLA out.” The EPA not only blocked accomplishment of that goal, it
also thwarted local efforts to cleanup the region’s environment.

“It definitely has taken the wind
out of our sails,” group official Peter Butler told The Denver Post in
May. “It’s uncertain what the Animas River Stakeholder Group’s future
will be.”